Explore the sounds of the early web with The MIDI Archive

Searching the future for what resides in the past

Archives seem to have come into a kind of fashion in the late 20th century, and increasingly so as of late. There's something knowable, certain, and grounding about the idea of archives, especially in a time of greater existential and perceieved precarity. The training procedures of AI foundation models like GPT have a close relationship with archives too, but instead need their accessibility, volume, and givenness, which allows archives to be composed and instrumentalized as training sets.

Beyond the veil of nostalgia, a home to which one cannot return, this project presents a naive machine learning model alongside an informal archive of music from the early web. These two components have developed alongside each other, and shape each other's sensibilities and expression. The MIDI files collected here were once very new and I've been sifting through them in search of the feeling of transformation, how they unify the possibilties of new aesthetic experiences with the technics of producing and distributing this particular format of media. In both machine learning and the archive, there exist archetypes of transformation and stasis, around which we shore up our hopes and fears about how we ourselves may change.

Technical notes

The neural net model used here is simple by design, and you can check out and run the source code yourself right from your browser. My intent is to have the model be able to express something at once whimsical and general about the underlying archive, and to be simple enough to serve educational purposes. It does not represent the state of the art in 2023, nor is it intended to be used seriously as a tool for music creation. Furthermore, I planned for this model to be portable and cheap to run. In its current implementation, it exists as a ~800k parameter decoder-only transformer model that runs from an AWS Lambda Function every day around noon (GMT) to produce a piece of music around three minutes in length.

This project also owes a debt to BitMIDI, which also developed the MIDI player I've implemented on this site for your listening pleasure.

A brief history [1980 — 2000]

Before MP3s came to dominate how people would listen to music on the internet, the sounds of the early web (and even BBS and Usenet before the world wide web) were predominantly expressed via MIDI. Its tiny file-size was accomodated by bandwidth limitations of the 1980s and 90s, web-native support for the format came early from browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

There are currently 30980 MIDI files in the collection!

  • In addition to browsing the archive below, click here to listen to music produced by the neural net model. This music is generated daily at noon (GMT), so check back again later!

    • Table of contents for the archive:

    John Sankey - Harpsichordist to the Internet

    This collection of MIDI files is hosted on Dave's J.S. Bach Page, and it covers a portion of John Sankey's MIDI recordings. For a time, he was known as the Harsichordist to the Internet ...

    MAHAMIDI --- Midi Files of John Mclaughlin

    The Play List For The Vietnam Veterans Home Page

    Textes et Musiques du Moyen Age

    The Israeli Jewish Yiddish Hebrew Folk Cultural Music Midi Free Library

    Laura's Midi Heaven

    Elephant Talk - The Official King Crimson Website

    Bot Productions' MIDI Collection

    Computer Generated MIDI MUSIC by Colin M. Johnson

    Christian MIDI Archive

    The Internet Renaissance Band

    Frank Lennon's IRISH MIDI FILES

    Prairie Frontier